Round 2 – Match 4

Based on the feedback I’ve heard from a lot of you, it seems like an anime-game-focused blog would have significant audience potential. But I don’t think Moonlit Asteria has a shot at even gaining a minute percentage of the market; the Engrish is just too distracting.

Look, as a native English speaker, I don’t mind if ESLs create their blogs in English. Honestly, I appreciate the fuck out of it — the aniblog scene could always use more talent, even if there are occasional syntax mistakes on the internet as a result. What I do mind is if I can’t understand any of a blog’s posts due to broken English.

When I saw that Moonlit Asteria had an Unhack review up, I was intrigued. The game’s cheap, and I’ve been on the purchasing fence since it came out. Unfortunately, I could make neither heads nor tails of the author’s points. Here’s a sample of the writing I had to wade through:

“It’s hard to argue that the voice-over option does sell the game itself (due to the fact very few groups can afford or in the original vision), although it does stand well on own merit with the voice appeal only half of the enticement.”

You may claim be smart in your own language, but you’re assuredly dumb in mine. More importantly, this kinda writing smacks of you not even trying to improve. Stop wasting the internet’s time.

If this guy ever QC’d his posts, I wouldn’t mind seeing him write for Crymore. …so yeah, I like this blog.

Tallon points out things that you wouldn’t really expect to see in a review. For example, in his Spicy Wolf post, he bitches about character relationships not meshing up with the passage of time. It’s been a while since Spice & Wolf came out, but I never recalled that being a notable point of discussion.

The hallmark of a good review is liking it, even if you disagree with the conclusion. Going back to Spicy Wolf, Tallon gave it a 7/10, which I think is classic highway rape (10/10 for me). But I still enjoyed it, mainly because his distinctive voice overrides his lack of English skill. 24FPS is easily the standout blog in Match 4, and if you can read past the lack of editing, you’ll see why.

I remember when Star-Crossed used to be relevant… back when it was one of the few blogs that would spring to people’s minds when they thought about aniblogging. Now? It’s been left to rot.

Well, I don’t want to paint such a rosy picture of aniblog domination. They don’t even have 13 million hits, and they’ve been going since 2006, so I wouldn’t consider them too much of a success. Just wanted to give you my impression of the scene from back when I had no skin in the game.

Last year, the site founder (psgels) called it quits, leaving his crumbled empire to some kid named AidanAK47. So that brings us to Aidan.

AniRecs is another blog that I thought mattered… somewhat. But seeing as there have been all of 2 visitor comments on the site in the past month, it appears I was quite wrong.

I have reached out to AniRecs staff for comment.

Until they get back to me, let’s take a look at a review of theirs — Kuroshitsuji: Book of Circus, an anime which I really liked. Unfortunately, AniRecs can’t be bothered to explain exactly what about it is good, despite giving it an 8/10.

The first five paragraphs of the “review” are devoted to summary. Past that, four paragraphs are aimed directly at Kuroshitsuji fans (it’s February 2015, dumbass — the fans have already seen it), with only two that could be targeted at a broad audience:

“Not that anyone escapes their past or their sins. All the players are on the treadmill to hell; it just depends on who is going to get there first.

But, it is an intriguing and entertaining show, as we track down mystery upon mystery and see the true nature of everyone who inhabits this Alternative London. I am giving a very strong recommendation to see it.”

What, you aren’t swayed? Let’s try another review — Nanana’s Bizarre Adventure. In this eight-paragraph post, seven paragraphs are dedicated to basic plot summary. Here’s the final paragraph, and the entire portion of the actual review. Can you guess what score they gave it from the writing alone?

The first thing that caught my eye was a meta post on the site, celebrating one million reviews. It’s a good milestone, sure, and I don’t mind vicarious nostalgia. So let’s see how this guy celebrates it.

…well.

Fortunately, the latest review since the milestone doesn’t have any waifu commentary. On the other hand, after reading it, I’m rather convinced Lady Luck has it out for me.

Apparently, TPAB has never heard of brevity. I opened the review, started scrolling, and when I reached the end, my pubic hair had grown back. Come on, man, you know how long it takes to tweezer that stuff out? Fucking longer than it should, that’s how long.

The few paragraphs I managed to read were… not horrible, but “not horrible” isn’t enough to make me waste that much time on a post. According to Niram.org, it’d take the average person 28 minutes to read through that post. Shit, dude. If you have to write your posts that long, find some way to break them up. Spoiler tags for each section of the review would make a lot of sense. And that way if people can’t commit a full half-hour to a post, they at least have a “bookmark” if they wanna come back to it.

If I had to guess how the poll’s gonna go, I’d say 24FPS gets the most votes, followed distantly by TPAB, which only qualifies for not being as bad as the rest. But let’s see.

Oh, if the post as a whole didn’t go through, not just the link, then yeah, it was probably just the spam filter getting uppity (that or it just failed to submit). Dark_Sage goes through the queue and manually approves real posts whenever he gets to it.